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In her 2015 article, ‘Psychoanalysis in times of technoculture: some reflections on the fate of the body in virtual space’, Alessandra Lemma encourages us ‘to consider not whether this [i.e. what we now call cyberspace] is right or wrong, good or bad, but whether psychically the individual can cope with what is being presented or enacted within a given virtual space’ (p. ). Lemma asks us to assess how the individual may be utilizing cyberspace in service of some inner force, the motives behind which may be completely unclear, and she asserts that ‘in order to engage theoretically as well as clinically with the current times we have to move beyond the binary logic of virtual and real, and understand the world we are currently living in’ (p. ), which may be more a hybrid of the two.
We are in a globalizing culture that is attempting to understand how the inner self is moving beyond the skin and into the cyberworld since the inception of cyberspace roughly 20 years ago. Originally cyberspace was a repository that was intact, separate and had clear boundaries. It was experienced as an object simply viewed and therefore able to be abandoned as you averted your gaze. However, as I reflect on this article, I'm left wondering at what point did the lines begin to blur by transforming the computer from a mere object into a virtual subject for ‘the virtual world offers everyday users an experience that is neither entirely virtual nor real, but one that has been helpfully described by some media theorists as “virtually actual”’ (Coleman , p. 571). It is ‘actual’ insofar that the communication exists realtime online between at least two people, unlike email, and thus may evoke emotional resonance.
Cyberspace, like all objects, is capable of carrying projections, but what is different is that cyberspace is not a static object but rather an interactive subject able to carry and interact with parts of ourselves. For the more vulnerable psyche I do not believe th it is a stretch to im